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Tilt-O-Mania, also known as Nokmote
Have you ever felt that your idea is stolen and "Damn, I wish I had been faster in doing it"? Now I feel exactly that way.
The first time I heard that another Nokia phone, N95, has a built-in accelerometer I started wondering why on Earth? Why on Earth is it worth for Nokia to put such a device in their phone? Has Nokia 5500 Sport (first Nokia device with built-in accelerometer) proven
that it's worth making further experiments with? I haven't seen any
analysis telling so, although I admit that it doesn't mean anything.
Why on Earth has Nokia kept it secret that there was such a gadget in their hottest device? Is it a secret? Isn't it something that makes the device even cooler?
Then I started to think about what we could do with it? First, I thought RotateMe was a great software, I really liked the idea. But I felt something was missing. Then I found it: why not simulate joystick key presses
(i.e. left, right, up, down + press) by tilting the device to the right
direction? Since it's fairly easy to simulate key events in Symbian C++
just as if they had really occured, I thought it was easy to implement.
The good thing in this idea that it works with existing software, no need to re-write or adapt anything: applications will not notice the difference between real keystroke and simulated.
Tilt-O-Mania
That would have been the name of my software. R.I.P. Now it's called Nokmote and it's not mine at all. 
Sorry guys behind the "sad smiley", I'm happy that you'll come out with an implementation, but I must tell you that I'm unhappy that you'll come out with it. 
To
be honest, I was always wondering why nobody had ever discovered the
opportunity in writing such a software. As more and more S60 devices
will come out with built-in accelerometer this feature could become such an integral part of user experience that even Nokia might want to use it. I dare to claim that even the joystick could be replaced by the accelerometer + this solution in the future. Not only could Nokia save some money by removing some existing hardware (i.e. the joystick), but they might even be able to use the new spare space for other purposes. Isn't it so cool?
And you know what? The solution is not Nokia/Symbian specific: any (mobile) device having a motion sensor could do on-screen navigation like this. Another Symbian phone, iPhone, gPhone
even a laptop, though it would be funny to see a businessman tilting
his computer at the airport just for the sake of navigation.
On the other hand, I was shocked to find that my(?) idea was not original
at all. I mean not that now somebody has come out with an
implementation for S60, but this idea was implemented years(!) ago on
another mobile phone. You know, some of my colleagues have worked with
a MyOrigo device and when I told them my idea they enlightened me that it had already been implemented. Check out this article from The Register and
you'll see that such a device is already on the market. Okay, it is a
not-really-famous mobile phone and perhaps it doesn't even make use of
accelerometer data, but still the idea is theirs: user tilts software
navigates.
Never mind, although I'm sorry to see that I can't be
THE pioneer in this area, I'm happy to see that it'll be available to
us soon. Good luck for writing the software!
Originally from mobile-thoughts.blogspot.com.
Tote
Re: Tilt-O-Mania, also known as Nokmote
Yeah, its a nice idea, but not THAT innovative
We had students doing their masters thesis on accelerometer navigation at our company last summer, and the use for navigation in games is kindof obvious I think. (and a well proven concept)
There is a lot of tweaking to be done before its really useful though, if you do a naive implementation, the user will quickly get tired in his hand.
Also you have to think of scenarios as when the user is in a bus, or a train, where you have a lot of "noise" in the gravity signal.
I never think it will fully replace the joystick or touch navigation, but it sure is a welcome complement.
Re: Tilt-O-Mania, also known as Nokmote
We use a simliar imput method called "camera based motion control" [1] Imho a accelerometer do a better job to detect motion.
But make your own impression within ower city maps application [2] (use '7' or camera key to enable motion detection).
[1] http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~vidya/papers/adaptive_views.pdf
[2] http://smartsam.de/35998
Re: Tilt-O-Mania, also known as Nokmote
Camera motion is cool
we released a (quite crappy) duckhunter game for symbian using it 3-4 years ago... Really bad screen handling, so much slower then needed unfortunatly.
Accellerometer gives a whole different world of accuracy though.. you could never do something as accurate as a roll-the-ball tilt-game using just camera motion detection...
Re: Tilt-O-Mania, also known as Nokmote
Actually you can do something as accurate as the roll-the-ball game just with the camera using motion detection or object trackings.
It is possible to get the rotation (in three axis) change of scale and shifting with a feature machine that gets frames in real time.
Of course the accelerometer gives you another device to play with, so is another possibility to complete your interfaces.
Touch screen + camera + accelerometers can be all that you need to create a better input interface .
Answering who says why nokia people has put the accelerometer inside their phone and never said so. It has an explanation. It is used for HW video-stabilization. They didn't provide an interface on the operating system. Now they notice that some cool stuff could be done with it (see iphone) and they decided to give it some other functions (N82 can also rotate the screen, because it has a video stabilizer too).
Re: Tilt-O-Mania, also known as Nokmote
Well, you usually have a factor 10 higher resolution in your measurements when using accelerometers, and the gravity you can use as reference does not get interfered in an unnatural way if the user decides to move his hand, as object tracking will..
The tilt game relies on very accurate angles measurements to the ground plane, and that is quite hard to do reliably with object tracking afaik...
Thats what I meant with a whole other world of accuracy
Not denying you can still do a lot with only camera ofcourse
Re: Tilt-O-Mania, also known as Nokmote
Yep! Probably you are right. Even so, with the camera you van get really good resolution of the shifts although not as good with the angles.
Anyway what I wanted to say is that the good thing would be using both at the same time.
(i.e.) Rolling the ball in the real world with augmented reality can be a really funny game.